Japanese arcade restroom asks customers to declare loyalty for dogs or cats in toilet paper poll

When most of us go to the bathroom, we don’t really expect to called on to make a decision. The Number-One-or-Number-Two selection is, after all, something our digestive system largely takes care of for us.

So Twitter user @ayukiyo was understandably surprised when he stepped into a restroom stall in a video game arcade in Chiba Prefecture’s Matsudo and was suddenly asked a deeply ideological question.

Two rolls of toilet paper were mounted on the wall, with the left labeled “cat people” and the right “dog people.” There were even cute illustrations on the labels, because cuteness never takes a break in Japan, not even during bodily waste expulsion.

It looks like an overwhelming victory for dog people, given how much more of their paper has been used. However, our college toilet statistics professors would be upset if we didn’t point out a few ways the results could be skewed.

● The photo was taken in the men’s restroom, so it only represents, at most, the feelings of males.
● It’s possible that the males who were polled like dogs and cats in equal numbers, but that the ones who prefer canines simply poop more frequently, in larger quantity, or with greater gusto/greasiness.
● Conversely, perhaps cat people poop so much more often that their roll gets replaced more frequently, and the one seen here still has plenty of paper left because it’s a refill.
● There’s a chance that, given the intense rivalry between dogs and cats (and by extension their human supporters), cat-loving restroom users collectively decided to flush all the “dog people” paper down the toilet as a devious prank.

It’s also worth noting that the cat people were apparently much tidier in tearing off sheets of paper, with that predilection for cleanliness perhaps being why they feel a greater affinity for felines.

Speaking of cleanliness, @ayukiyo’s snapshot prompted another Japanese Twitter user to share something he’d seen in another public restroom: a second roll of paper labeled “perverts.”